It's nice that Maarius is excited for the game but a lot of these are redundant hype threads with a lot of hyperbole. No offense, but yea. Fan promoting....

While I agree there hasn't been many new conversations on this board lately I don't think there is much we can do about it. Some of this information is new to some readers and I expect the amount of new readers to increase in the coming months. But what really irks me is the people who just post to bash GW2 for not being "traditional" and those that try to make excuses for it not being traditional.

OT - Great info/Video, i already knew about the "new" combat style, but also you have provided some great extra details, Thank you. P.S What is wrong with a bit of Hype

As for WoW It hasn't died obviously, but it for a lot of people, did get old/stale fast. Particularly people who played it since day Dot, and that is to be expected, only so much same old, same old you can take, but at least this year there are two games that might be a bit of competition GW2 and Tera new standards in regards to how MMO should perform

I'm a fan, yes obviously - but I can't see why you are attacking me for handing out information which we fans collected from various official sources and people who played the game on demostations. All I see is a lot of misinformation here in the forums so I try to make this threads for people who don't got all these informations in the first place. What's wrong with that? disappointed.

Wasn't attacking you personally. Your intent is admirable. But there is already a huge information thread. 4-5 threads covering essentially the same stuff with a lot more hyperbole and sloganeering is not really, um, worthwhile.

It invites two things which are loathsome: 1. backpatting, "Yea, Maarius this gonna be great!" or 2. glib stupidity, "Warcraft is dead. Can't wait for GW2 to run it into the ground!"

I don't understand what is happening in this video that's fundamentally different from anything happening in WoW.

Also, I don't understand this part either:

A lot of people who played the demo on convention didn't get how to play the game. They stand in front of the enemy and try to do a rotation. Many mmos have burned this into our brains: you do best when you learn your rotation by heart and thats it.

In GW2 the skills are mostly situational. You have to watch the battlefield and react to the things that happen. You won't have to stare at your buttons, to find the right moment after global cooldown to hit the next one. Nearly every spell can be cast on the move, it's much more action oriented. There are no stats which let your character block incoming hits. You have to dodge actively, because you actually see a hit incoming.

WoW also doesn't have rotations if you add "situational" factors, such as interrupts, movement, incoming abilities that can't be avoided, buffs, debuffs, everything else that's happening around you, etc, so I don't understand how GW2 will be different - or even how it can be different. Since we'll be playing a game where abilities can be objectively measured, there will always be a "perfect" "rotation" for any situation where you're left to just stand there and attack something that isn't trying to obstruct you. You can then add random factors, and the aforementioned "situational" factors, to mess the perfect "rotation" up, but you will never be able to remove it.

On my fire mage I can also cast 'nearly every spell' on the move, and I both can and *have* to actively dodge stuff that I see incoming from other players, such as the players themselves, and the same is true for all my warrior, my death knight, my rogue, my hunter...

I honestly don't see how anything that written here has articulated anything fundementally different from anything in WoW. Rather, all I see is yet another iteration of the same thing. It might be a better iteration, or a worse one, or just a different one, but it's still the same thing as far as I can tell, and the "good bye static rotation, welcome active battles!", "You won't have to stare at your buttons, to find the right moment after global cooldown to hit the next one", etc, rethoric is just obnoxious. You basically radiate "I am too biased to be trusted to give any kind of a fair representation of how the game actually is".

I don't know what game you've been playing, but outside of when I play my ret/prot paladin, I neither adhere to a static rotation (though, even on my paladin the rotation isn't static, so the use of that word is just hyperbole), nor spend my time looking at my buttons - in fact, my buttons aren't even visible on my screen, hidden from view as they are because they don't need to be seen.

Kind of makes me think of peter molyneux. All like "omg u can do dis and dis and dis and eet will be awesum", and then it's just the same thing all over again, but slightly different.

while modern day WoW has move from rotations to priority systems, the system is very different from GW2. Besides getting out of cleaves and damage areas on the floor, WoW's battle are very much static. In GW2 you can dodge nearly every attack by simply moving away from the attack, and that is considered and integral part of the battle system. Aside from bosses how often is that done in WoW? Even raid bosses consist of mostly stand still in a certain area and moving at times scripted in the encounter. I would hardly call that system dynamic.

I don't really want to comment anything about World of Warcraft, but I think people mean different things when they mean ''dead''. A lot of people think when a game is dead it means that no one plays it, and that's it. Other means that the game has lost it's soul of what it once was used to be, and it's just a walking corpse at the moment, rotting everyday passing, soon to collapse with some maggots left inside it.

I think it's good that Marius posts information like this in separate threads, since people often don't bother to read posts like stickies with all information gathered together. So keep posting these threads.

Since we'll be playing a game where abilities can be objectively measured, there will always be a "perfect" "rotation" for any situation where you're left to just stand there and attack something that isn't trying to obstruct you.

Right. So the question is, how often are you just standing there trading blows with the enemy? You'll be doing that much less often in GW2, which is a big part of the appeal.

I don't understand what is happening in this video that's fundamentally different from anything happening in WoW.

Also, I don't understand this part either:

WoW also doesn't have rotations if you add "situational" factors, such as interrupts, movement, incoming abilities that can't be avoided, buffs, debuffs, everything else that's happening around you, etc, so I don't understand how GW2 will be different - or even how it can be different. Since we'll be playing a game where abilities can be objectively measured, there will always be a "perfect" "rotation" for any situation where you're left to just stand there and attack something that isn't trying to obstruct you. You can then add random factors, and the aforementioned "situational" factors, to mess the perfect "rotation" up, but you will never be able to remove it.

On my fire mage I can also cast 'nearly every spell' on the move, and I both can and *have* to actively dodge stuff that I see incoming from other players, such as the players themselves, and the same is true for all my warrior, my death knight, my rogue, my hunter...

I honestly don't see how anything that written here has articulated anything fundementally different from anything in WoW. Rather, all I see is yet another iteration of the same thing. It might be a better iteration, or a worse one, or just a different one, but it's still the same thing as far as I can tell, and the "good bye static rotation, welcome active battles!", "You won't have to stare at your buttons, to find the right moment after global cooldown to hit the next one", etc, rethoric is just obnoxious. You basically radiate "I am too biased to be trusted to give any kind of a fair representation of how the game actually is".

I don't know what game you've been playing, but outside of when I play my ret/prot paladin, I neither adhere to a static rotation (though, even on my paladin the rotation isn't static, so the use of that word is just hyperbole), nor spend my time looking at my buttons - in fact, my buttons aren't even visible on my screen, hidden from view as they are because they don't need to be seen.

Kind of makes me think of peter molyneux. All like "omg u can do dis and dis and dis and eet will be awesum", and then it's just the same thing all over again, but slightly different.

You will never adhere to a rotation or priority system when fighting mobs or bosses in GW2 because there are no clear cut roles. You can't do a dps rotation or priority rotation when you're always responsible for the damage you receive and the damage you heal. If you take damage you're responsible for it and must heal yourself, unlike in WoW where if you take damage from something unavoidable it's the problem of the healer, not you, so you can continue to dps/hold aggro.

About you having to dodge 'players' on WoW, b-b-b-b-bullshit. You can't dodge a player in WoW, you can run away from him, and then he CC/slows/sprints to you where he will then enter a circular hit box where he is then able to hit you... period. Dodging/parry/blocks are all handled by rng stats, not player input. Attacks that come your way home into you, and only miss if the RNG gods say it does. Anything you can 'dodge' out of it an AoE, and those AoEs are instantly put where the player wants them. You're going to take a hit.

Here are some things to note in the video that I think you missed.

Ranged players could shoot/use ranged abilities out of range. What this means is that using an ability outside of the range of the weapon/skill would result in a cast, but the ability would hit nothing but air.
Abilities don't require a target to be cast and can hit players in the line of fire.
There are no dodge/parry/block stats. If the attack misses you, it's because you dodged out of the way, got into LoS during/before the travel time, were out of range. Never because a stat you had decided for your character to dodge.
You can't shoot through the terrain (Something that bugged the hell out of me in WoW... WSG especially, those big hills and trees do nothing to LoS.)

"Questions are for those seeking answers. Those who have answers are those who have asked questions." -Mike R. (Malthurius)

incoming attacks:
Until now there was this standard that you couldn't really evade enemy attacks if you were in line of sight. (with the exception of a small number of invincibility spells). If shots were fired at you, the only thing that minimised the incoming damage were numbers. So you had to prepare before the fight, equip good enough gear, to survive attacks. Sometimes you couldn't even hide behind smaller objects, the projectile went easily through the object and hit you anyway.

This is different here: every profession has the ability to dodge, 2-3 times in a row, until the dodge-meter refills automatically. While doing this maneuvre you are invincible for a moment. It has nothing to do with your gear or numbers. It's your skill on the battlefield which decides if you live or die, not your "skill" in gear-farming and mathematics.

Projectiles hit objects. Players are actually objects, so you can't hit someone with a projectile, who hides behind an other hostile player. This is huge imho. It hasn't anything to do with numbers either. You can actually help your friends who get bombarded by an enemy ranger by standing in front of them. I would call this "ranged tanking"... even if there are no dedicated tanks in the system any more.

You can attack areas on suspicion without aoes. There might be some cloaked enemy nearby, so you can do attacks without the need to target someone. All your spells can be cast without a target. Don't want to spend your precious Aoe to find out if a thief hides in the corner... simply attack the corner.

changing weapons/playstyles:
Then let's talk about weapon swapping. A weapon in GW2 defines half of your skills, it defines your playstyle. These changes can counter enemy playstyles if done properly. You can swap from a very offensive playstyle to a defensive playstyle in a second, 10 seconds later you can switch back to your offensive playstyle. So it is up to the player to read a situation and change accordingly... and this happen during a fight. If you are annoyed about this stupid ranger who attacks you from afar: swap to your ranged weapons and counter him from a better position.

It's totally viable to use bow & sword with the same equipment, since the stats: strength and agility got reworked into one stat: power. All your weapons will be fully viable.

combos:
certain skills have a second function: they work as starters or finishers. You can do combos if you do a finisher to the position someone (or yourself) casted a starterskill. The most common example of a starterskill would be the firewall from the elementalist. If you see this firewall, you can now interact with it by using the right finisher. A ranger would simply use his standard-shot as a finisher. He shoots through the wall and his arrows turn into fire-arrows which set enemies on fire.

Those combos are, from what I have seen, ways to supplement your build. They aren't stronger than any other skill, they simply do something different. A thief might be a weak supportclass, he has some supportskills but not nearly as much as other professions. But when he uses finishers, he is able to be a great supporter too. His leaping death blossom (a kind of summersault spinning dagger attack) into the right starter-field removes conditions (debuffs) from nearby allies. So these combos really encourage you to observe your surroundings, other than looking on the UI for some energypoints or Addons like SliceAdmiral or RoguePowerBars etc (yeah, I played WoW too).

->
I see where you are coming from, there are certainly situational skills in WoW, but they mostly change only numbers (autoevade, autoblock, 20% damage-reduction etc). It's not bad if you like these kind of systems, but I see a clear difference to GW2 either way... and I don't know how you didn't see a difference from watching the clip above.

PS: well then you are certainly a better WoW player than I ever was, I used bartender (addon) to optimize my skillbar but I could never manage to play without seeing the skills... I used a lot of tools like power auras to indicate my proccs and this wasn't how I imagine a fun fight anymore. Seems WoW-kind games simply don't cater to me... I'm not good enough. Played a Retri/Prot-Pala 3 Years (mostly as tank).

I don't understand what is happening in this video that's fundamentally different from anything happening in WoW.

A big difference is the healer factor. In WoW your health is constantly being filled to full in pvp from your healers and its always a fight to kill the healer/keep them cc'ed. In guild wars 2 you have the occasional heal, but your still quickly loosing health in pvp. So it never turns into a long 45 min + match like you have in some arenas in WoW. Also pvp is a lot less dependent on cc's/interrupts unlike in WoW, so you dont spend half the time in a pvp match as a sheep, or feared because honestly that's not fun.

looks and plays no diff to wow, like ive said any times after playing the demo at eurogamer it nothing new, hit a few cooldowns in a rotation then spam 1 button.
You people shouldnt get hyped over it so much because you will only be dissapointed when its something you think it should be but clearly is not on release.

I don't know what game you've been playing, but outside of when I play my ret/prot paladin, I neither adhere to a static rotation (though, even on my paladin the rotation isn't static, so the use of that word is just hyperbole), nor spend my time looking at my buttons - in fact, my buttons aren't even visible on my screen, hidden from view as they are because they don't need to be seen.

you are right, a ret-pala uses a priority system... but that's the same problem for me (I only talk for me this time): you don't watch what the enemy is doing (well you do a bit, but it's important to watch your own proccs in order to do a lot damage. (When I stopped playing WoW Ret-Palas had to press the right buttons at the right time... for their own proccs). If you try a class which uses rotations (most of the WoW classes who don't use a priority-system) then it's pretty the same.

looks and plays no diff to wow, like ive said any times after playing the demo at eurogamer it nothing new, hit a few cooldowns in a rotation then spam 1 button.
You people shouldnt get hyped over it so much because you will only be dissapointed when its something you think it should be but clearly is not on release.

holy shit your right if it warnt for the title I couldn't have telled the difference.
/sarcasm

looks and plays no diff to wow, like ive said any times after playing the demo at eurogamer it nothing new, hit a few cooldowns in a rotation then spam 1 button.
You people shouldnt get hyped over it so much because you will only be dissapointed when its something you think it should be but clearly is not on release.

well you clearly had no clue what you were doing then. I saw a lot of youtube-videos from guys who played the game like they would play WoW... And then you look at some guys who know how to play this game and then you see the difference.